From Dynamics365 Team Blog: Unlock insights and power personalized experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Today, people have access to more content, purchasing channels, and brand options than in the past, and their expectations for great customer experiences continues to grow, even in uncertain times. To win and retain loyal customers, companies need to understand, value, and build trust with them, and proactively serve them through seamless, personalized experiences on every channel.

To deliver these types of experiences, companies need one single source of truth with one view of each customer, and which provides not only a current view of customers but also what the future view could be.

Why is it so challenging for companies to get these kinds of insights? With the emergence of so many customer touchpoints, the evolution of a company's infrastructure over time, and the exponential data growth of recent years, data is coming from everywhere.

Data is often siloed across multiple systems and departments, making it difficult to collate, organize, and shape into a holistic view of a customer, let alone to extract meaningful insights that empower employees with predictive, recommended next best actions.

That's where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights comes in. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is an intuitive and flexible customer data platform (CDP) that enables you to unify all your customer data across a full range of sources to get a single view of your customers in real time.

Want to learn more? Watch an overview video about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights on YouTube.

Customer Insights enables you to:

• Connect data from any source including point-of-sale, transactional, behavioral, and customer preference data with pre-built connectors, or by connecting to a data lake to ingest data and create the view.
• Unlock insights and create actions using rich segmentation, customer and business measures, profile enrichment, and AI-driven insights with out-of-the-box and custom modelsenabling everyone from data analysts to marketing and sales professionals to use the data.
• Consume, adapt, and extend these capabilities through Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications, and other connectors to third-party products, as well as for advanced analytics using Azure Machine Learning and Azure Synapse.
• Rely on the trusted, hyper-scale Microsoft Azure platform so that all customer data is securely managed and adheres to GDPR regulations and strict privacy standards. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is also available in the Microsoft Government Cloud, an environment built to meet the compliance needs of the United States government.

Use pre-built connectors to a full range of data sources

You can simplify the process of pulling in data with pre-built connectors available for myriad first- and third-party data sources, such as Dynamics 365, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob storage, Salesforce, and SAP. To learn more about data sources, check out the documentation: Available data sources

Map, match, and merge to create consolidated customer profiles

It's a three-step process to map, match, and merge the data into a single, unified view of your customers. To learn more about the map, match, and merge process, go to the documentation: Data unification

Enrich customer profiles for greater insights

You can enrich your customer profile with data from additional sources, such as from Microsoft Graph, or company data provided by Leadspace or CivicScience. You can then use this data to create actionable segments, for example for high-value customers. Or, expand on the segments to consider lookalike modeling for targeted marketing or sales campaigns.

Enable predictive insights

Customer Insights enables you to take advantage of out-of-the-box AI capabilities on top of your unified customer profile. For example, the subscription churn insight helps predict whether a customer is at risk for no longer using your company's subscription products or services.

You can train the model based on the data in your unified customer profile, and then set the model to retrain itself regularly to continuously improve results.

For custom predictive insights, you can use Azure Machine Learning and Azure Synapse Analytics, which combine customer data with enterprise data to develop, train, and fine-tune machine learning models.

Surface data and insights at every customer touchpoint

The unified data and insights about your customers can be surfaced and consumed at every touchpoint where employees connect with them, including these examples:

• Build a Power App that shows rich customer data, such as transaction history, segments that include the customer, and recommended next best actions.
• Download the customer card add-in from AppSource to access unified profiles directly within Dynamics 365 business applications.
• Use third-party connectors such as LiveRamp, Facebook Ads Manager, or other pre-built connectors to export data for use in other third-party applications.
• Use APIs to extend the customer view for your own in-house applications.
• Connect the customer data with Power BI to create custom dashboards and reports that enable informed decision-making.

Recent feature updates

Here's a quick summary of recently released capabilities:

• Ingest analytical data from Dynamics 365 applications with Common Data Service – Common Data Service is now available for creating data sources in Customer Insights. Learn more about connecting data in a Common Data Service managed lake.
• Export destination to LiveRamp – Activate your data in LiveRamp to connect with over 500 platforms across digital, social, and TV ecosystems. Learn more about using LiveRamp in Customer Insights.
• Connect to Microsoft Teams – Connect to Microsoft Teams to look up customer profiles with the help of a bot with an add-in available on AppSource. Learn more about using the Teams add-in.
• Meet strict security and compliance requirements with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Government – Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is now available for the Microsoft Government Cloud, an environment built to meet the higher compliance needs of United States government agencies. Learn more about using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Government.

Check out these links to stay informed about what's planned for the next six months and what has just shipped.

Join our community and get started today

Get the latest information on the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights community page, where you'll find upcoming events, featured blogs, and other useful posts. Also, check out the following resources:

• ms/CIdoc Read the documentation for how-tos and deeper information about capabilities.
• ms/TryCI Start a free trial, view a demo, and bring in your own data to create unified customer profiles.
• Watch an overview video about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

The post Unlock insights and power personalized experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.